


Some Things Never Change

by MightierThanSwords



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Ableism/ableist language, Alternate Universe, Gen, Mentions of offscreen murder/suicide, Potterlock
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-09
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-08-14 01:34:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7993774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MightierThanSwords/pseuds/MightierThanSwords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which John is invalided out of the Hit Wizards with major curse damage, Mike Stamford offers him a job instead of a flatmate, and Sherlock is still an idiot.</p><p>(Potterlock AU based on ASiP.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The Ministry archives and the grumpy animals are my own inventions, the rest is borrowed from BBC's Sherlock and JK Rowling's Harry Potter, with help from some ACD canon. The intention is for this fic to be the first in a Potterlock series.

The best day of John Watson’s life was the day he received the owl from Hogwarts that told him he was a wizard.

The second best day was the first time he successfully completed a mission, throwing a Shield Charm in front of an important ambassador and stopping a lethal curse in its tracks, and his comrades had given him looks of approval. It felt like his entire life had been leading up to this point, justifying his wand and his magical education and his right to live in the magical community.

The worst day of John’s life was the day he received the owl to tell him his parents were dead. He was sixteen years old, sat at the breakfast table in the Great Hall, and had dropped pumpkin juice all over his books in utter shock. For weeks afterwards the other students gave him pitying looks in the corridors and the common room, and all he could think about was that the last time he’d seen his mum and dad, he’d been rushing to get on the train and had forgotten to say he loved them.

The second worst day came when he woke up in St Mungo’s and knew immediately that his career was over.

He could remember every second of the duel that had put him there. Streaks of blinding light, the screaming, the way the bodies of his team were crumpling around him. Their assailants had no qualms at all about using dark spells, some of them even Unforgivables, and the ambush had been so sudden and without warning that they barely stood a chance.

John had been just feet from the Portkey when he’d been hit, and had been dragged to safety by one of the juniors on the team, mumbling _fuck, am I glad to see you, Bill_. When the Portkey had dropped them at the safehouse, he’d pulled out his own wand and tried to fix the damage, but whatever the spell was that had torn at his skin and settled like ice in his bones, he couldn’t identify it.

The nurses in the hospital took good care of him, but their kind manners weren’t enough to dull the pain in his leg and shoulder, or the leaden weight in his stomach. The Healers weren’t much better, having just as little success at removing the curse damage as John had. The open wounds were gone but the invisible scarring was still there, even after weeks of trying every combination of healing spell and potion therapy they could think of.

The silver lining, they’d said, was that his wand had survived. The length of alder had been put into his grasp almost within hours of wakening like some sort of security blanket.

Fat lot of good that was to him. The day he was released from his bed at St Mungo’s, he was also released from service.

* * *

John’s therapist was a serious, no-nonsense witch with a careful manner. There was very little she couldn’t take in stride and had he not resented being there, he might even have liked her. Almost three quarters of the session had passed already and John had done very little in the way of talking but it didn’t seem to faze her at all.

She folded her arms delicately across her parchment notes. “How have you been sleeping?”

“Well enough. Regularly.”

The look Ella levelled at him told him plainly that she didn’t believe him. “Are you still taking Dreamless Sleep?”

“When I need it,” he hedged. In truth, almost every night John would eventually give in to the exhaustion and down a vial. There were only so many times you could jerk awake from a nightmare and remain optimistic about your ability to roll over and go back to sleep.

“I don’t mean to lecture you, John,” Ella started, in the tone of voice that said she was going to do exactly that, “but it might be worth limiting your potion intake. Continued use can make you lethargic, prone to daydreaming… I’m concerned there might be adverse reactions.”

As if he didn’t know all of that, didn’t know just as much about healing as she did. As if he didn’t hate his own reliance on potions, his own traitorous subconscious - almost enough to wonder, sometimes, if getting no sleep at all was really such a poor alternative. Last night he’d eventually given up at five in the morning, rolling out of bed onto his good leg and trying to rationalise the whole thing as an early start to the day.

All the sacrifices he’d made and this was his reward. Some days he wished he’d never got his Hogwarts letter.

He didn’t say any of that. “I know. I’m trying not to take it so often.”

She scratched something onto the parchment in front of her. At this angle John could just make out the words. “And how is the diary going?” she asked.

It was an empty notebook with ‘John H Watson’ written neatly on the inside cover. “You just wrote ‘still has trust issues’,” he said.

Ella’s eyebrows lifted smoothly. “And you read my writing upside down. See what I mean?” She sighed. “John, it’s going to take you time to adjust to having a normal life. You might not believe me now, but you have the power to help yourself through all of this, and keeping a record of everything that happens to you will honestly help you.”

John snorted humourlessly. “Nothing ever happens to me.”

When she let him go fifteen minutes later, he was armed with several vials of Calming Draught which would inevitably collect dust next to all the others on his bathroom shelf, and no more Dreamless Sleep. He pressed his lips together at that and didn’t comment. He could buy or even brew his own, if need be.

John considered going straight back to his flat, but he didn’t much fancy sitting alone all day with nothing but his thoughts for company. He Flooed to the Leaky Cauldron instead, stepping awkwardly out of the fireplace with aid from his cane, cursing fire travel for all it was worth. He’d never much been one for Apparition either but for months now he’d done nothing but long for the option.

Once upon a time the bustle of Diagon Alley had made John feel alive. It was the perfect sum of wizarding London - busy, colourful, magic everywhere. Now, it just made him feel left out. All around him there were bits and pieces of magic that he could no longer perform, and then there were all the bloody steps, including several up into Gringotts which he couldn’t avoid. He withdrew enough money from his vault to buy the bare minimum that he needed and winced at the dwindling pile of Galleons in the corner. 

The witch in the apothecary was harried-looking and brusque, which suited John just fine because he wasn’t in the mood for another lecture about the harmful long-term effects of Dreamless Sleep, but as he left the shop and rejoined Diagon Alley he wished he’d lingered a little longer. He could go and stand outside Quality Quidditch Supplies and stare wistfully at the broomsticks, he supposed, but that had lost much of the charm it’d held when he was a boy. At least back then he could entertain the hope that he would ride one.

“John? John Watson?”

The voice came from somewhere behind him. John turned and blinked in bemusement at the portly little wizard who’d addressed him. The man was friendly-looking and vaguely familiar, but the face was hard to place.

Evidently he’d hesitated too long. “Stamford, Mike Stamford,” the wizard said brightly. “We were at Hogwarts together.”

“Ah, yes.” John stuck his hand out awkwardly for Mike to shake. It took him a moment to reconcile the small, bright-eyed student he remembered, whose Gryffindor robes had dwarfed him, with this rather more stout man in front of him. “Mike. Hello.”

Mike seemed to know exactly what he was thinking. He smiled wryly. “I know, I got fat.”

“No, no.”

Mike laughed and waved off his discomfort. “Don’t worry about it. Listen, why don’t we get a drink? Have a quick catch up. It’s been years.”

John checked his watch, stared at the numbers for a few moments, and then realised the whole thing was pointless since it wasn’t like he had anywhere to be anyway. He shrugged. “Yeah, why not.”

They ended up in the Leaky Cauldron, sat at a table adjacent to an old wizard who was apparently unaware that he was knitting his own beard into the scarf he was making. John rested his cane carefully against the edge of the table and waited, feeling awkward and out of place, for Mike to come back.

“There.” Mike put two steaming mugs down between them and sat heavily in his seat, beaming at John. “I’m surprised to see you in London, if I’m honest,” he began conversationally. “Last I heard you were halfway across the world fighting duels and dodging curses. What happened?”

“I got cursed,” John said shortly. He immediately regretted the honesty at the look of pity on Mike’s face, and tried to change the subject, schooling his features into something approaching polite interest. “Are you still curse-breaking?”

Mike seemed relieved at the change of subject. “No, I’m at the Ministry now. Just moved departments actually. Bureaucracy like nothing you’ve ever seen but it’s better than the goblins.” He chuckled. “Lunch breaks are longer too. What about yourself? Staying nearby until you get yourself sorted?”

“Oh, I can’t afford London with what’s left in my vault.” It was true. The pile of galleons was slowly dwindling now that he had no real job to speak of. He only stayed in London to postpone the day when he would eventually have to leave.

“And you’re letting that stop you?” Mike asked, giving him a conspiratorial wink. “That doesn’t sound like the John Watson I know.”

John tightened his fingers around his mug and stared at the contents, willing his hands not to tremble and reveal just how close to the mark that comment had been. “I’m not that John Watson anymore.”

There was a long silence. When John finally glanced up, he saw that Mike was shifting uncomfortably in his seat, looking apologetic. He fumbled with his drink. “Couldn’t Harry help? I know that’s far from ideal, but…”

“Like that’s going to happen.” John would go to Harry for help when he had not a Knut to his name and his wand was snapped in two, no sooner. He’d rather struggle miserably on as he was than go through all of that.

Mike knew that. He’d met Harry. “You could get a job,” he suggested instead.

John snorted. “Come on. Who’d employ me? The only things I’m qualified for, I can’t do anymore.”

“Not necessarily,” Mike said slowly. He grinned. “Have you ever heard of the Department of Magical Records and Archives?”

* * *

John had not set foot in the Ministry for a very long time, since he’d been given his last assignment in fact, but he found that it had changed very little. As a matter of personal preference he’d always preferred the Hogwarts castle. The courtyards and towers appealed infinitely more than the feeling of being buried underground that the Ministry gave him.

The Department of Magical Records and Archives - or more simply, according to Mike, ‘the archives’ - was the exception to this rule. It shared level ten with the Wizengamot courtrooms, so by rights should have felt claustrophobic, but John found that the archives reminded him very much of the Hogwarts library on a much bigger scale. The ceiling was cathedral-high, supported by ornate columns, and there were tall windows on each level, letting in shafts of magical sunlight.

The most striking thing about the archives were the rows upon rows of bookshelves, going back as far as John could see, quite possibly never-ending. It made him feel absolutely tiny in the same way as looking into an infinite starry sky. On each floor the shelves were several times his own height, and completely full, crammed with books, stacks of parchment and a collection of items and artefacts, each one different. John leaned in closer to examine a small mirror sat innocuously on the closest shelf and saw the subtle blue glow of a Stasis Charm around it, and the little tag attached which read _B346/03, suspected Medusa hex_. He backed away from it quickly. Most likely the hex wouldn’t work in stasis, but he preferred not to risk being turned to granite all the same.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Mike laughed at the expression on John’s face. “There’s everything from birth records to old evidence from MLE investigations in these archives. They relocated here after the fire at Alexandria.”

“I didn’t even know this place existed.”

“You’re not the only one. Most people never come down here,” Mike said, setting off down the central aisle. “Half the Ministry have never even heard of it.”

John hurried to follow Mike as fast as his bad leg would allow him, not wanting to risk getting left behind. It was like a forest of bookshelves in here. He could imagine that if you lost your way it would take weeks to find it again. “Isn’t it dangerous, having it all in one place?”

“Dreadfully, yes. Luckily the archiving system is so poor that an intruder would take days to find anything worth stealing or reading. If they didn’t get themselves injured by any of the artefacts first, of course.”

“Does that happen a lot?”

“More than you’d think.” Mike slowed his pace a little, ostensibly to check the little gold numbers on the edges of the shelves. John, gripping his cane tightly in an effort to ignore the cold pain in his leg, was both relieved and annoyed by what was obviously meant to be a polite gesture. “Back when I was here, there was a wizard who managed to sneak in to access a confiscated Pensieve. Unfortunately for him, it was broken. Ended up getting memory-lost.”

John frowned. “Don’t you mean memory loss?”

“No, no, actually lost. Never came back out again. We only knew he’d been there in the first place because we found his cloak,” Mike said, grimacing. “It takes common sense to work in the archives. A bit of knowledge about dark curses, so you know the things to avoid. Aha, here we go.”

They’d arrived at what was obviously the main office. It was made of the same dark wood as everything else, and looked very much like it might have grown right out of the bookshelves surrounding it, barely interrupting them. Inside, there were three desks, a fireplace, and yet more books and files.

“Once upon a time that fireplace was a Floo point to the rest of the Ministry, but it threw a tantrum and disconnected itself years ago. The Network have tried multiple times to reconnect it and for some reason it refuses to cooperate, more’s the pity.” Mike sighed. “Keeps you warm, though.”

John saw the fondness in Mike’s expression. “Why did you move out of the archives? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“They offered me a position in Accidental Magic Reversals. It paid better, simple as that.”

“Lucky for me, I suppose.”

One of the desks was obviously occupied, with a couple of photographs and a half-full inbox, but the other two were empty and unused. Behind one of them, taking up an entire wall, was an incredibly detailed map which appeared to show each individual bookshelf in the archives. Every so often part of it would flicker, as if something was moving or changing, or the aisles were rearranging themselves.

“Some of the shelves have a mind of their own,” Mike explained, as he and John watched one of the labels rewrite itself. “The aisles swap around a lot, like the Hogwarts staircases. It can help if you want to move about the archives quickly, but you have to be careful, since some of them disappear altogether sometimes.”

John raised his eyebrows. “How do you ever get anyone to agree to work here?”

Mike laughed and gestured around the office. “You’ll notice there aren’t many desks for such a big department. It’s a shame. The archives only really need maintenance, but a few more wands wouldn’t go amiss - at the moment Molly’s the only one down here.”

“I’m assuming that’s her desk there?” John pointed. Curled up on the chair next to the desk was a huge grey cat that blinked up at them reproachfully with lamp-yellow eyes, as if annoyed they’d disturbed its rest.

“Yep. Molly’s a lovely girl, a bit quiet, but she’d look after you.”

There was something cosy about the little office. It was like a cabin in the middle of a forest, an oasis in the intimidating endlessness of the archives outside, and John found himself charmed despite everything.

The rest of the tour was brief, since it seemed that apart from the office, every part of the archives looked much the same as the rest. Each shelf was marked out by a small golden plaque, Mike explained, and was charmed to extend indefinitely as more relevant items were added to it. Apparently it was a neat and foolproof system, until you needed to retrieve something.

Mike stopped suddenly at the next intersection, peering down one of the aisles. When he turned back to John, he was grinning wryly. “I was hoping for this,” he said cryptically. “We’ve come on the right day - because before you decide about the job, there’s one more thing you should know about the archives.”

“That sounds ominous.” What now, did they have a dragon standing guard over the most sensitive files? An infestation of Dementors?

John followed Mike as he turned and strode away through the shelves. It took him a moment to spot that this particular aisle wasn’t empty like all the others; about halfway down and on the second level up, there was another wizard moving around, the first sign of life John had seen in the archives at all besides himself, Mike, and the cat.

They drew closer and stopped at the bottom of the ladder. All John could see of the man at this height were his legs and shoes, even when he craned his neck upwards, since he appeared to have his torso draped over a stack of books. “Mike, have you got the time?” the man called down. His voice was deep and library-muffled.

Mike looked confused. “Couldn’t you just cast a Tempus Charm?”

The man appeared at the top of the ladder and started the climb down, materialising rung by rung until John was face to face - well, figuratively, since he had several inches on John - with dark curly hair, high cheekbones and startlingly pale eyes. It was a striking mix. The wizard was tucking a folded piece of parchment into an inside pocket and looking disgruntled. “I left my wand at the desk.”

The ‘desk’ was a mess of parchment and books stood at the base of the ladder, which John had initially taken to be part of the bookshelf. When he looked closer, he could see the ornately carved legs just visible under everything spread across it.

“Oh, well -”

John had his sleeve pulled up to look at his watch before Mike could so much as wave his wand. “It’s half past two.”

The wizard turned his attention to John for the first time with a vague expression of surprise, as if he’d only just realised John was there. “Thank you.”

Mike gestured to John. “This is an old friend of mine, John Watson.”

John found himself then on the other end of a sharp gaze which felt uncannily like a Disillusionment Charm scraping over his skin. It was over as soon as it began, and then the stranger, apparently disinclined to make any introductions of his own, was rifling through the mess of parchment on the desk. “Hit Wizard or Magical Security?” he asked casually, without looking up.

It took John a moment to realise he was still being spoken to. “I - wait, what?”

“Which was it, Hit Wizard or Magical Security?”

John squared his jaw. “Hit Wizard. Sorry, how did you -?”

The wizard straightened up with a sound of triumph, now clutching his wand, a long length of dark wood. He waved it negligently, wordlessly sending all of the scrolls floating back to their places on the shelves and making the desk pop out of existence. “And now you’re taking a job in the Department of Archives. Interesting.”

“I haven’t decided, actually,” John shot back. He looked at Mike. Was this some sort of elaborate prank on the newcomer, arranged in advance? “Did you tell him about me?”

Mike’s expression was mischievous. Whatever was going on here with this stranger, he was clearly enjoying it, and he resembled his Hogwarts self much more closely in that moment. “Not a word,” he said lightly.

“Then how did you know?”

The stranger gave him a look, the sort of resigned disappointment with which an owner looked at their pet when they pissed on the carpet. “It’s obvious.”

“Obvious.”

“Yes, obvious, that’s what I said.” He tucked his wand away and starting pulling on a long coat that had appeared out of nowhere - it must have been Conjured, although John had never seen him do it. It was then that John realised the wizard wasn’t wearing either the Ministry insignia to suggest he was an employee, or a name badge to suggest he was a visitor. John himself had a little silver badge clipped to his front pocket.

The man gave them a faintly apologetic look. “Sorry, got to dash, think I’ve left my scarf in the Improper Use office. Afternoon, Mike. Nice meeting you - John, wasn’t it? I’m sure I’ll see you next time I’m in the archives.” With that, the wizard turned on his heel and swept away towards the end of the aisle in the direction they’d just come, coat billowing out behind him like the robes it so closely resembled. 

John felt a surge of annoyance. “I haven’t decided,” he said again, this time much louder, at the stranger’s retreating back.

The wizard paused, glanced over his shoulder with the corner of his lip curled into a smirk. “Yes, you have.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

Apparently sufficiently baited, the man turned back to face him fully, eyebrows raised. “Can’t I?”

“No, of course not. You don’t know anything about me.”

The wizard squared up to him then, an intent look in his sharp eyes. For a brief, mad second when the man opened his mouth, John thought he was going to get hexed, but then:

“I know you’re highly trained in combat and you’ve just finished a stint with the Hit Wizards. You were discharged from the force because of injury, curse damage that they couldn’t reverse, that’s why you’ve got that cane. I know you’ve got a sibling who’s worried about you, but you won’t go to them for help - possibly because they’re a Muggle, more likely because you’re proud and don’t like accepting charity. You trained in another field before you signed up - impossible to tell which one without more data - but you can’t switch career because the curse damage has left you with reduced capacity for magic. So, you’ll take this position in the archives because it’s less about wandwork and more about knowledge, and you need the money.” He eyed John carefully, as if daring him to contradict any of it. “That seems more than adequate to prove me right, don’t you think?”

John blinked. This time, he didn’t try to stop the man as he strode away.

The stranger paused anyway, just before turning the corner around the bookshelves. He was smirking again. “The name is Sherlock Holmes, by the way, since you told me yours. Now we’re even.”

And then, with a wink and a goodbye to Mike, he was gone.

John turned to Mike, whose eyes were sparkling with amusement. “Yes, he’s always like that.”

“Is that sort of a thing a regular part of this job, then?” 

“He’s a bit… unusual, I’ll grant you. Brilliant mind though.”

“Does he work here?” If he did, would that alter John’s decision? Make him more or less inclined to take the job? He wasn’t sure.

“Not precisely,” Mike shrugged. “But it’s far more trouble than it’s worth to try and keep him out.”

“I can imagine.”

They were back on the central aisle by now, yet again by themselves. They spent the rest of the walk back to the main doors in comfortable silence, lulled that way by the calm of the place. The more John saw of it the more he realised that comparing it to the Hogwarts library was like comparing a puddle to an ocean.

Mike eventually broke the silence as they neared the staircase that would take them back up to level nine and towards the lifts. “So. What do you think, then?” he asked.

“It’s not what I expected,” John said slowly.

Mike nodded. “I know it’s very different from what you were doing before. But it pays. And you’d be doing the department - Molly, really, and my guilty conscience - a huge favour.”

“Well, you know what they say. A change is as good as a rest.”

Mike’s expression brightened. “So you’ll take the job?”

It went very much against John’s instincts to jump at an offer like this, however kind of Mike it might be to help him out. It didn’t matter how much another archivist might be in demand - it still felt ever so slightly like charity. At any other time, he would have hedged, told Mike that he hadn’t decided yet.

But John had been back in London for weeks now and had yet to do anything beyond a few visits to the bank and the shops to feed and clothe himself. The archives were the most interesting thing that had happened to him so far - the job was worlds apart from vicious duels and impossible missions, but something about the place was strangely attractive, like the first time he’d seen Hogwarts castle and wondered that such a place could even exist. And the archives contained intriguing, dangerous artefacts and a strange wizard who could read your life history with one look at you. It wasn’t all boring.

“Probably,” he said honestly. “Besides, I have it on good authority that I don’t have a choice.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Three more request forms since this morning, two of them rushed,” John muttered, glaring at his inbox. “Where do they think all of these files come from? Thin air?”

Molly gestured at the pile of ancient spellbooks she was levitating between their desks. “The same place as all their cast-offs go, I guess.”

John snorted, tossing a roll of parchment into the bin with relish. He’d taken the desk opposite Molly’s, so they both had an easy view of the map, which despite everything else the archives had to offer, John still thought was the most impressive thing he’d seen. It was a beautiful bit of magic. Currently, two little dots labelled John Watson and Molly Hooper were sat in the tiny ink office, but when one of them was out and about in the archives proper, the other could follow their progress. Molly had explained on John’s first day that it was useful not only for finding bookshelves, but for locating lost colleagues and visitors. He still wasn’t sure whether or not she’d been joking. It was always hard to tell with Molly.

Strange sense of humour aside, however, she was nice, a young, pretty witch who was every bit as quiet and shy as Mike had said - the epitome of a Hufflepuff. She didn’t look like the exceptionally talented curse-breaker she apparently was, and John had no idea how she’d ended up running the Department of Archives all by herself; but she’d let him have the job without fuss and she never asked about what he’d been doing before, or commented on the dark rings under his eyes the morning after a bad spate of nightmares, or questioned his minimal use of magic. She simply picked up the heavier tasks automatically, reassured him that she’d deal with any complicated spellwork, and asked him if he’d like a cup of coffee.

“These need to go on the Outdated Curriculum shelves.” Molly sighed. The stack of books wobbled dangerously. “I hate going to Records of Education. The bookshelves are so unpredictable.”

“Use the ladders.” For the most part, they let the changing aisles take them round the archives, since most of the shelves were apparently very set in their ways and could be trusted to follow certain patterns. Day by day, under Molly’s guidance, John was starting to learn them all. In places where the shelves were less reliable, however, he’d discovered that certain ladders were very cooperative and could be persuaded to take a body halfway across the archives on their rails if asked nicely.

“I think they like you better than me.”

John smiled. “I’ll take your request forms too, if you like. Keep out of Toby’s way.”

If the ladders liked John better than Molly, then Toby very much had the opposite opinion. Toby was the great grey cat that John had seen on his first visit, who supposedly had lived in the archives for longer than anyone could remember, resisting all efforts to remove him. The creature should probably have died by now, but John suspected he was clinging to life in order to retain the use of his claws and teeth, which only Molly was safe from. As such, John often made excuses not to be left alone in the office with him.

Molly giggled. “Help yourself.”

He left the office before Molly by design, caught a changing shelf to the second floor Death Records aisle, and settled in for the foreseeable future there. Most of the requests they received were from Administration Registration or Improper Use, meaning that a lot of John’s time today would be spent trawling the Records of Magical Population shelves.

It was a tedious job, searching through endless files, and it had to be done manually even by someone with magical ability, since there were so many people with the same name that you’d be bombarded with rolls of parchment if you attempted to use a Summoning Charm. John himself was no less than the thirty-fifth John Watson to have a file in the archives, and ‘Watson’ wasn’t even a magical surname. John’s favourite people were the ones who’d named their children something ridiculous and unique, since it made finding the right file much easier.

Monotony aside, however, John was pathetically grateful for the task, because he didn’t have to feel incompetent for not using magic to complete it. Molly, for her part, was delighted, assuring him she’d always hated the files and taking over everything else happily. By unspoken agreement they’d fallen into a rhythm over the last couple of weeks, wherein John handled most of the parchment records, and Molly spent most of her time levitating heavy objects between shelves and trying to find empty spaces to put new items.

Working in the archives was an odd job. When there were fewer retrievals to make and things slowed down, John found it dull, and being stuck underneath the Ministry in a repetitive job still felt demeaning, but it was better than staring at the walls in his flat and it would keep his vault ticking over. Later, John would wonder that he’d ever found the archives a peaceful or boring place, but in fairness, by this point, he was yet to have a proper encounter with Sherlock Holmes.

The first time one of the little memos swooped past him, John barely caught sight of it in his peripheral vision, and he dismissed it as one of the oddities of the archives. Some of the artefacts were simply more mobile than others, and he had no desire to either chase them, worsening the pain in his leg with every step, or to shepherd them back to their shelf with a spell that would no doubt take all of his energy.

It wasn’t until the second and third memos flew past in quick succession, about ten minutes later, that John got a good look at them and recognised them for what they were. Apart from himself and Molly, the archives were ostensibly empty, and Molly would either be in the office or in Education, which offered no explanation as to why the Ministry memos were going in the opposite direction. When finally the fifth memo flew past, nearly skimming the bridge of John’s nose, he gave into his curiosity and followed it.

The memo was headed in the direction of Investigations, a part of the archives John rarely went in. Like Mike had promised, this was where the old MLE evidence was held. It was mostly dark or cursed items, along with shelves and shelves of criminal records and illegal crimes. John knew very little about the layout of the section apart from the fact that some of the Constitution and Law shelves cross-referenced there sometimes, so he followed the memo closely even though his leg protested, until the scrap of parchment took a sharp turn around one of the bookshelves into a narrow aisle and shot away out of sight.

There was a glimmer of yellow candlelight just visible from the end of the aisle, proving that whoever - or whatever - the memos were looking for, they were somewhere down here. John followed at a more sedate pace, wand drawn just in case, but when eventually he drew closer to the source of the candlelight he realised he didn’t need it. The intruder was hunched over a desk with only the top of his head visible, far too tall and masculine to be Molly, but John recognised him almost immediately anyway.

John stopped just short of the desk and leaned heavily on his cane. “Mr Holmes.”

“Sherlock, please,” the wizard corrected, flashing a smile in John’s direction. He didn’t look surprised or guilty at being discovered. John could hear Mike’s voice in his head, admitting that it was more trouble than it was worth trying to keep him out.

Sherlock seemed disinclined to say anything else. There was a book open in front of him, a handwritten list of names and dates, and he was tapping it periodically with his wand. Each time he did, the words duplicated themselves on a piece of parchment by his right elbow. The plaque on the end of the shelf told John that they were in the Gruesome Unsolved Murders aisle - where most of the books and files were kept behind wire mesh, between glass cases containing murder weapons - and John strongly suspected it was some form of data theft that he was obliged as an employee to put a stop to.

“You do realise the bookshelves move around, right?” he asked instead.

Sherlock waved a hand dismissively. “These ones are lazy. They move every couple of days at most and if they do they only ever swap with Unexplained Kidnappings or Magical Pastry Recipes.”

“I see.” John wondered if Sherlock had the entire archives memorised somehow. “And I don’t suppose fantastic cinnamon swirls are that much of a hardship.”

It was almost slight enough to miss, but John thought he saw something like amusement flicker across Sherlock’s face before his expression was schooled back into indifference. “You don’t seem that surprised to see me here.”

“I got the impression it was a common thing,” John replied honestly. “Although I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking how you managed to get in.”

“Molly knows I’m here.”

Yet again, John saw, he wasn’t wearing any sort of badge or identification. He could’ve taken it off, but he seemed more like the sort of person who would refuse to bother with one at all. It also didn’t pass John by that he had deliberately answered a different question to the one John had asked. 

“Right. Well.” He glanced at the desk, which looked much like one that had been Conjured last time he’d seen Sherlock in the archives. Next to the book Sherlock wasn’t meant to be duplicating were the memos that had brought John here in the first place, unfolded and then crumpled. He pointed at them. “I thought you didn’t work for the Ministry?”

“I don’t.”

“So what’s with all the memos, then?”

“The Auror Office has long since given up trying to pretend they don’t need my help.”

“The Auror Office?” John repeated.

“Yes.” Sherlock glanced away from his book to glare at the scraps of purple parchment on the desk in front of him as if they’d done him a disservice. “They’d drown in their own incompetence without me.”

There was a long silence, during which John stared at Sherlock staring at the dense lines of text in front of him, trying to wrap his head around the idea that this man who spent his time sneaking into the archives and acting superior was somehow also responsible for catching dark wizards. Unofficially.

Apparently unable to stand it any longer, Sherlock let out a sigh and sat back in his chair. He waved a hand at John accusingly, looking at him properly for the first time since John had first found him here. “I can’t work over the sound of you _thinking_ , it’s deafening. You’ve got questions, just ask them.”

“Who are you?” John burst out. “You told me my life story within minutes of meeting me, you’re catching criminals via interdepartmental memos - I don’t get memos and I bloody work here. What do you _do_?”

One eyebrow quirked in a challenge. “What do you think?”

“Well, I would have guessed that you’re a reporter, or some sort of investigator, but…”

“But?”

“That doesn’t explain how you can come and go without anyone noticing, or why the Auror Office would go to you for help.”

Sherlock gave him the ghost of a smile. “I’m a detective. A consulting detective, in fact, the only one in the wizarding world. I invented the job.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means that when the Aurors are out of their depth, which is always, they consult me.”

John laughed. “The Aurors wouldn’t consult an amateur.”

A muscle in Sherlock’s jaw twitched. “When I met you for the first time two weeks ago, I asked ‘Hit Wizard or Magical Security’, and you seemed surprised.”  
“Yes, how did you know?”

“I didn’t know, I _saw_. Anyone could if they look hard enough. The way you hold yourself, like you’re ready to leap into a duel at a moment’s notice - it practically screams combat training, law enforcement of some kind. The cane is just as obvious.” He fixed it with a narrow-eyed stare. “It can only be for the limp, since you don’t keep your wand in it and it’s not ornate enough to be decorative. You’ve been injured, but recently enough that it hasn’t affected your fitness. Any injury bad enough that St Mungo’s couldn’t fix must have been traumatic, most likely major spell or curse damage, which is why you’re no longer serving as a Hit Wizard. But Hit Wizards receive extensive training in all sorts of different fields, meaning that even with a physical injury you’re still qualified for plenty of jobs other than the archives - so why are you working here? The answer is in your watch.”

John struggled to make sense of that leap. “My watch?”

“Yes. It’s in pristine condition, which means it’s not likely to be secondhand, but a man accepting a job in the Ministry archives doesn’t have money to waste on fancy accessories - it’s a gift, then. The next bit’s easy, you know it already.”

“It’s Muggle.”

“Exactly. Muggle, but good quality judging by the look of it. The expense says it must’ve come from a close family member; could’ve been a cousin, I suppose, but if you’re short on funds it’s unlikely you’ve got extended family that you’re close to. Sibling, then, and a Muggle one at that. A gift like this suggests they care about you and wanted you to remember them, which begs the question, why aren’t they helping you out, putting you up or lending you money? Could be that you don’t like Muggle things, but you’re almost certainly Muggleborn and you’re wearing the watch, so that’s not it. The only explanation is that you don’t get on with them.

“But if you don’t get on, then you can’t be wearing it out of sentiment, which means it serves a function. Wizards don’t need Muggle watches unless they can’t cast a Tempus Charm, and wizards who can’t cast simple spells like that would never be accepted onto the Hit Wizard training programme, which means the need for a watch is a recent development. Most likely whatever curse crippled you also affected your magical ability, hence you jumped at a job which didn’t involve spellwork, even though it’s below you. There you go, you see.” He gave John a smug look. “You were right.”

“ _I_ was right?” John asked faintly. “Right about what?”

“Aurors don’t consult amateurs.”

There should be something invasive and embarrassing about it, about the way he’d just been pulled apart and analysed like some sort of literary character study, and John should want to say something sharp and rude to get his own back. But next to the usual discomfort John felt whenever he was reminded about his limp or his magic, there was also awe to help soften it. And Sherlock had said it all in such a matter-of-fact way, with no judgement or pity - just pure genius, and not in the everyday blasé sense of the word, either. John knew the difference.

He shook his head in disbelief. “That - that was amazing.”

Sherlock blinked back at him. “You think so?” he asked cautiously.

“Of course I do. It was extraordinary.”

“That’s not what people normally say.”

John suspected people rarely got a word in edgeways to be able to say anything. “Why, what do people normally say?”

Sherlock’s lip quirked. “‘Piss off’.”

John grinned back at him. “Yeah, that too.”

For a moment, the camaraderie between them reminded John of his old team, the back-and-forth and the dark humour and that feeling of _once more into the breach_. Then Sherlock blinked and looked away, and the illusion vanished.

“Of course, most people are morons,” Sherlock said archly, his expression back to disdain.

“I can see why you’d think that.”

A flash of purple caught John’s eye and then the sixth interdepartmental memo was flapping about their heads, batting repeatedly against each of their faces in turn like an overenthusiastic puppy. Evidently the things were charmed to annoy a person into reading them.

Sherlock rolled his eyes and snatched the thing out of the air, ignoring the way it quivered in his hands until he unfolded it. As he read, a scowl dug itself deeper and deeper into his forehead.

“For Salazar’s sake, they’re all _idiots_ ,” Sherlock said, waving his hands emphatically in the air. “I have to go.”

“The Auror Office again? Is it a murder?” John snorted.

“Yes, actually.” Sherlock leapt to his feet, slamming the book closed with a thud and making John jump. He pressed his lips into a thin line. “The blithering morons will have moved everything by the time I get there, couldn’t use a bit of common sense even if someone Imperiused them into it -”

“Wait, there really is a murder?” John pressed himself back against one of the shelves to avoid being hit in the face by a book Sherlock had banished. “You’re going to a crime scene?”

“No, I’m going for a drink in the Leaky with the Minister - yes, of _course_ it’s a murder,” Sherlock snapped. He brandished his wand a couple more times and John swore the desk vanished of its own accord this time, just an instant before the _Evanesco_ , in its haste to avoid the man’s ire.

“Right. Okay.” John watched Sherlock fold up the piece of parchment he’d been filling and tuck it inside the pocket of his jacket. “You know, I should stop you taking that.”

“Luckily for me, you won’t. I don’t have time to argue.” Sherlock had his coat on then, the same one which had appeared so inexplicably last time, and a scarf too.

Apparently he was incapable of ending a conversation like a normal person, and had to disappear in a rush with the tails of his coat swirling dramatically round him as he strode away.

John hurried to follow. “Where exactly are you going?”

Sherlock cast a Tempus Charm, one which was accurate down to a hundredth of a second, like a Muggle stopwatch. “I’m going to miss Torture Methods changing,” he said, setting off decisively in that direction, so fast that John had to jog to catch up, which was murder on his injured leg.

He caught up to the man’s elbow. A plaque to their right snagged John’s attention. “Sherlock -”

“In a hurry, John.”

“No, wait - this one, here -”

John grabbed the sleeve of Sherlock’s coat and dragged him round the corner of the nearest bookshelf, into what he recognised as the Non-fatal Magical Illnesses aisle. The aisle was afflicted with its very own case of incurable hiccups - every so often it blinked into existence somewhere random, staying for little more than a minute before re-establishing itself back near the main archives office every time.

There was a moment of stillness in which absolutely nothing happened. Sherlock huffed out an annoyed sigh and scowled down at John, tugging his sleeve loose. This close, the man towered over him. “I don’t have time to mess about, the longer I take to get there the more data Lestrade’s team will manage to destroy -”

“Just trust me, alright? I do work here.” The nearest shelf creaked in warning as if to prove him right, and John pulled them a little way further down the aisle just to be on the safe side. The whole thing felt covert, exciting, like being out in the field again, and that was the second time he’d felt that today. The second time in ten minutes, in fact. John forced himself to relax. “See? It’s starting now, hang on.”

The feeling of changing aisles was like a watered-down version of Apparition. It took a little longer, a handful of seconds, but was less uncomfortable; there was a growing sensation of the shelves pressing in and twisting around you, a dull roar in your ears, and a brief moment of weightlessness before the change happened properly and everything resolved itself into normality again. It felt a little like one of the Muggle fairground rides John used to like as a kid.

Sherlock took off almost as soon as the change was over. John caught up with him just as he peered around the edge of the shelf and realised where they were, most of the journey time having just been cut, and watched his expression morph into one of surprise. He slowed. “Thank you,” he said, and the words seemed stilted and unfamiliar on his lips.

John couldn’t help but feel a bit smug whenever he forced someone to re-evaluate him. From the Quidditch team captain who’d watched in amazement as he slugged a Bludger halfway across the pitch and straight through a goal hoop, to every assailant or criminal who’d underestimated him because of his size - and now, to Sherlock, who was watching him thoughtfully with his head on one side.

“That’s one of the first aisle changes I learned about. Lets me do the minimum amount of walking, when I can find it.” John tapped his leg with his cane. “You’re welcome.”

Sherlock recovered then, and set off up the central aisle in the direction of the exit. This time, he kept his long strides carefully paced with John’s limping ones so that they could walk together. It was an obvious ploy, but for once, John didn’t feel as if he were being patronised or coddled. 

“Did I get everything right, by the way?”

John wondered if Sherlock always spoke in non-sequiturs. “When?”

“Earlier. My deductions about you. Was everything right?”

John nodded. “I was a Hit Wizard until three months ago. Curse damage, during an ambush. As for Harry, we don’t get on, never have, I don’t see why that would change now that I’m practically a Squib.” Their mother had always said it was jealousy over John’s magical ability; certainly after he’d gone to Hogwarts they’d grown further apart than ever. It would amuse Harry to realise just how much like his old Muggle self he now was, he thought bitterly.

“Your brother,” Sherlock said decisively, skipping over the rest of it without an ounce of the sympathy John usually got when he told his story. “I thought it was a brother.”

John grinned. “Actually, Harry’s short for Harriet.”

“Oh.” The self-satisfied expression quickly became an irritated scowl, which very much seemed to be the only two emotions Sherlock could express. He shoved his hands into his coat pockets defensively as he walked, looking like nothing more than an overgrown child. “Well. There’s always something.”

John’s grin widened, and he hid it behind a cough.

They walked the rest of the way in silence, Sherlock still sulking and John content to let him do it. When eventually they drew level with the office, John slowed to a halt. “I think you can find your way out from here.”

“Yes, thanks.” Sherlock paused and tilted his head thoughtfully. “I did get one other thing right, though.”

“What’s that?”

“You. I knew you’d take the job.”

It would probably feed his ego far too much if John said that his curiosity about Sherlock had played a role in that decision. It was mostly a money thing anyway, he told himself. “Of course you did,” he said instead, rolling his eyes and smiling back to show that he didn’t really mean it.

“It was a stupid thing to do,” Sherlock continued, voice still completely matter-of-fact. “I meant it when I said it was beneath you.”

John tried to accept the backhanded compliment with some sort of grace. He lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “Not many other offers.”

“I’m offering.”

“Sorry?”

“You could come with me.” Sherlock waved the memo at him, the one with the Auror summons. “You’re an ex-Hit Wizard. Highly trained, seen a lot of trouble. What’s more, you’re clearly a Gryffindor - you thrive on danger. Perfect at a crime scene.”

For a brief moment, John considered it. Following this madman about, solving murders, doing something useful. He hesitated. “I’m not sure…”

“You’re wasted here, John.” Sherlock watched him steadily. “The archives are no place for someone like you.”

But the mention of the archives reminded John that there was a very good reason why he’d taken the job in the first place, and abruptly all fantasies of going back out into the field vanished. “Neither is law enforcement. I was invalided out for a reason,” he said, voice deliberately light. He glanced down at his leg, which was already sending lances of pain up his spine just from the small amount of walking they’d done. “I don’t think I’d be much use to you.”

“I could always use an audience.”

“I’m sure you’ll manage just fine on your own.”

Sherlock frowned as if debating whether to continue arguing, but John’s tone and expression were closed enough that he decided not to. Instead, he shrugged delicately. “Of course I will. It was just an idea.” He smiled apologetically. “Well. I’d better hurry, before Lestrade manages to make a complete farce of it.”

John nodded. “Good luck.”

Sherlock flashed him a half-grin. “Luck is for stupid people,” he said, turning and walking away, calling over his shoulder. “Afternoon, John.”

John shook his head at the retreating figure. “The Sorting Hat must have had a bloody nightmare with you,” he sighed.

The office was empty of all life when John went in, including the feline minion of evil, and a quick glance at the map showed him that Molly was still in Records of Education. For once the inboxes were empty, however, so he felt justified in taking out his wand and casting a series of very careful spells to fill the ancient willow-patterned teapot with fresh boiling water and more tea leaves from the tin on Molly’s desk. The magic came relatively easily this time, and when John sat back in his chair with his hands wrapped around his _A hit with the witches_ mug, the left one only shaking slightly, he felt oddly pleased with himself. He resolved to take Molly a cup of tea when he was done with this one. Records of Education wasn’t that far, and he could probably conscript a few ladders to the cause.

* * *

It turned out to be a strange day all round, because when John got home that evening, his flat wasn’t empty. He didn’t recall leaving the window open, but there was an unfamiliar owl perched on his kitchen counter, a small rust-red screech which was glaring and ruffling its feathers at him as if John had invaded its home instead of the other way around.

When he crossed the room to try to take the parcel attached to its leg, the owl screeched and snapped its beak in a less than warm welcome, but no amount of shooing shifted it any closer to the still-open window.

“Right.” John sighed heavily. Time for a different approach.

Trying not to turn his back on the creature completely, he dug through the cupboards behind him until he found an old packet of half-stale digestive biscuits which had been abandoned there about a week ago. Breaking one in half and setting the packet down on the side, he held it out gingerly towards the owl.

It cocked its head thoughtfully, but this time it let him approach, and the moment he was close enough, darted out to snatch the digestive from John’s hands.

“Oh, so you’ll eat my food, then.”

Preoccupied with the biscuit, the owl ignored John while he came close enough to untie the ribbon that held the parcel to its leg. When he got a better look at it, he realised it wasn’t a parcel but a rolled up newspaper, which would have been an entirely normal thing but for the fact that John no longer bought any newspapers, having got out of the habit of reading them while in service.

He glanced at the owl. “Are you sure you’ve come to the right address?”

It looked back at him balefully, evidently not appreciating his casting doubt on its abilities. It was close to finishing its piece of biscuit now, and rather than risk angering it, John reached for the rest of the packet and fished out the other half, limping over to the window and pushing it all the way open.

“Here.” He waved the digestive, and the owl immediately relocated to the windowsill, snatching it out of his grasp as it landed. “Go on, go home now.”

It sat, unmoving, and blinked at him. It had a remarkably intelligent-looking gaze.

John made a shooing motion in its general direction, but the owl clicked its beak at him and didn’t move. When he tried to get closer to push it out of the window, it snapped at him, narrowly missing his fingers. “You’re not getting any more biscuits,” he warned.

To demonstrate that exact fact, John turned back to the kitchen and replaced the digestives in his cupboard. He heard the flutter of wings behind him and smiled in satisfaction, but when he turned round, he saw that the owl had perched itself on the edge of his bed instead, and now the window was very firmly, very inexplicably, shut.

“Alright. Fine.” He threw his arms up. “But I’m not going to bloody feed you.”

When John realised he was essentially engaged in a staring contest and a one-sided argument with an owl, he gave up completely. He supposed it made sense. His job was filled with impossible creatures, why shouldn’t they start invading his home too?

John turned his attention to the paper instead, still rolled up on the counter. When he opened it, he saw that it was a copy of the Daily Prophet, today’s, with a huge headline that covered most of the front page on its own: _The “Muggleborn Murderer” claims a third victim!_

The article attached to the headline was little more than theatrics and embellishment. The author, a witch called Kitty Riley, according to her byline, hadn’t managed to get a single quote from anyone actually on the case, and most of the space that wasn’t taken up by the headline was given over to mourning the loss of public safety in recent years and questioning why MLE had failed to apprehend the killer. The only piece of balanced journalism on the page seemed to be the final paragraph.

> _The murder of Beth Davenport, Junior Undersecretary to the Head of the Department of Magical Transportation, is the latest in a series of vicious crimes by an unknown dark wizard. These are believed by investigators in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement to be blood-status hate-crimes, with all the victims so far having being Muggleborn. While the Ministry claim to be working to find the culprit and bring them to justice, I urge the magical community to be on their guard at all times and to come forward with any information that could assist the investigation._

There was a photo of a grey-haired wizard accompanying the article, scowling alternately at the camera and at the floor. The caption read _Senior Auror Gregory Lestrade, in charge of the investigation_. Underneath was a second photo of the same wizard, this time surrounded by a team of other people in Auror robes, standing outside an old-fashioned block of London flats.

Sherlock was conspicuously absent from the photos, but John recognised the name Lestrade as the one that Sherlock had given before he left the archives. This could only have been the murder that he’d vanished to help with. John peered more closely for a glimpse of that distinctive coat, and read carefully through the article twice, gory detail and all. Although it listed several of the Aurors within Senior Auror Lestrade’s team and even some of the Obliviators and Muggle-Worthy Excuses personnel involved in the case, not anywhere could he find a single mention of Sherlock’s name.

As he looked closer at the pictures, nudging the photo-Aurors aside in case they might be concealing Sherlock, a small piece of parchment fluttered from between the pages to land at John’s feet. On it, there was nothing more than a short message written in elegant copperplate:

> _With compliments._  
>  _\- MH_

John felt a prickle of unease. He glanced up at the window, at the owl, and back to the parchment, his hand automatically tightening around his wand. Whoever this mysterious MH was, they clearly knew John’s identity, and about Sherlock and the archives as well. Was it a hint? Some sort of threat, perhaps?

He could find nothing in the paper about an MH, but he tucked it alongside the note into his desk drawer all the same.

That night, John located a self-inking quill, settled in the lumpy armchair he’d bought for his tiny living room, and wrote the first entry in his diary.


	3. Chapter 3

It took Sherlock a full week to make another appearance at the archives. During that time, John kept an eye out for more sensational murder headlines in the _Prophet_ , but although they continued to speculate, there were still no mentions of consulting detectives.

There were also no further messages from the mysterious MH, and after a couple of days John began to relax. He didn’t tell anyone about the incident, partly because no harm had come of it, and partly because there was no way of saying “someone sent me a newspaper and it was creepy” without sounding paranoid. In the light of day and with the note tucked away in his drawer, even John thought it sounded ridiculous. In fact, he might’ve thought it was all in his imagination, if not for the owl, which was very much real and presented a problem all of its own: namely, that it refused to leave.

Although he presumed it had belonged to MH, it seemed to have decided that John was now its owner, and couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. After wasting several more biscuits in an attempt to shoo it out the first morning, John had been forced to leave it in his flat while he went to work, opening the window in the vague hope that it might fly out on its own. Since then it had apparently decided that there should be regularly-scheduled feeding times, and it left angry claw marks on all the wooden surfaces if he went to work without offering it biscuits.

The day Sherlock came to the archives was also the morning that John woke up, twenty minutes late already, to find that the owl had somehow worked out how to get into his cupboards by itself, and overnight had polished off the rest of the digestives and half a packet of malted milks. It perched on his bedpost and glared at him as if it were his fault that there were crumbs all over his carpet.

“I’m not buying more biscuits, you know,” he told it.

The owl ruffled its wings, unconcerned, as if it knew John’s threat was an empty one. Getting nowhere fast - literally, and he was becoming more late by the minute - John gave up.

“Your owner must’ve been a right bastard,” he sighed, and this time he didn’t bother to leave the window open when he left.

The whole thing resulted in him arriving almost an hour late for work, to find Molly was already in the office, starting to make a dent in the shelving paperwork.

“Sorry,” he told her, limping in as fast as his leg would allow and grimacing at his watch. “Not all that professional of me.”

“No, not really,” Molly said brightly, then winced. “Sorry, I don’t mean that to sound - I’m not accusing -”

He raised a hand to stop her awkward backtracking. “It’s fine,” he reassured her. “Don’t worry about it. Is there lots to do?”

“Lots of paperwork,” Molly said, recovering herself and huffing a strand of hair out of her face. “I’ve shelved the incoming items, apart from a few from the Improper Use office which will need Stasis Charms - Venomous Tentacula seeds, a cursed tea service, that sort of thing - oh, and a bottle of dittany that didn’t have an intake form, I think that one was a mistake.”

“Right.” John dropped heavily into his desk chair. “You know, if we started a car boot with all the useless stuff we got in here, we’d be loaded.”

That earned him a blank look.

“It’s a Muggle thing,” he started to explain, and then gave up. “Doesn’t matter. Bad joke.”

“Oh, okay.” She still looked uncertain.

“Just seems like a bit of a waste, that’s all. All of this stuff down here that no one ever bothers with.” And all the hours they put in to maintain it, more to the point.

Molly’s lips twitched as if she’d heard his unspoken thought. “We get the occasional visitor.”

In all the time John had been here, he’d only ever seen four other living creatures besides himself step foot in the archives, and three of those were Molly, Toby and Mike Stamford. “You mean Sherlock Holmes?”

Her eyes widened slightly. “Yes - so you’ve seen - I mean, you’ve met him, then?” she blurted.

“Hard not to, it seems like he comes here often.”

“Most weeks. I probably shouldn’t - I know I let him get away with it too much, but I was here on my own and he’s just… he’s a bit hard to say no to, you know?” Molly shrugged, but her smile looked forced and embarrassed.

For a brief moment, her unexpectedly flustered reaction to the mention of Sherlock recalled memories of the newspaper John had received. Her initials were MH, weren’t they? Molly Hooper. But as soon as the thought occurred, he dismissed it. It seemed very out of character, far too sinister a thing for Molly to do. If she wanted him to read something she would just leave it on his desk.

“He told me he works with the Auror Office,” John said instead.

“It’s true. He gets me to help him with research sometimes.” She ducked her head slightly, taking a sudden interest in the tattered ends of her quill. “He’s, ah, very clever.”

“That’s somewhat of an understatement,” Sherlock said, appearing as if the mention of his name had the power to summon him.

Molly squeaked and dropped the quill in surprise. John glanced between Sherlock and the map on the far wall - specifically the complete lack of a _Sherlock Holmes_ label anywhere in the vicinity of the office, and didn’t that explain a lot - and managed a slightly more composed response. “Oh, hello.”

Sherlock was leaning casually against the door frame with his hands in the pockets of his long coat. “Afternoon,” he said pleasantly.

Curled grumpily on the spare desk, Toby’s ears twitched at the sound of the new voice. When Sherlock stepped properly into the office, Toby leapt from his vantage point and headed straight for him. John was about to give a warning, rising slightly out of his chair, when instead of launching an offensive the cat started winding himself around Sherlock’s legs and _purring_.

With a small sound of derision, Sherlock nudged Toby to one side with a foot. John half-expected that to be the tipping point for the vicious little creature, but instead Toby stayed exactly where Sherlock had put him, mewling plaintively.

“Whatever you just did, teach me.” John lifted his hand to display the three red scratch marks that were still there from a Toby-related incident last week, barely fading even now. He’d been unable to manage, and too proud to outsource, an _Episkey_ for them.

Sherlock’s face performed a combination of eyebrow lift and smirk that seemed to convey superiority. “I didn’t do anything. Toby is simply an excellent judge of character.”

Even more interesting was the effect Sherlock apparently had on Molly. When he belatedly turned his polite smile on her, she looked flustered and stammered through a hello. John recognised the signs of a schoolgirl crush immediately and was glad he’d dismissed the idea of asking her out himself almost as soon as it had occurred. Definitely not his type after all.

“It’s a surprise to see you here,” she said, cheeks pinking. “You don’t usually come to the office. Is there something you needed? There’s some new books that came in yesterday you might be interested in -”

“Actually, I came to look at the map,” Sherlock interrupted smoothly. “I was looking for an analysis on the ingredients of the Torporus Draught, but the Poisons and Antidotes aisle isn’t in its normal place.”

“No, it’s being temperamental this week, it’s cross-referenced itself to Education.” Molly fluttered nervously. She waved a folder in the air. “I’m going to Past Examinations, it’s on the way, I can take you to fetch it -”

“Best not leave John alone with the cat.” Sherlock managed to smile at her and smirk sideways at John all at the same time. “Wouldn’t want him to be clawed to death. But if you happen to see it, could fetch it for me? It would be very helpful.”

“Oh.” She nodded. “Yes. Of course.” Blushing, she forgot the folder and nearly tripped over Toby on the way out.

John watched her go with raised eyebrows. “I don’t believe for a second that you don’t know where the Poisons aisle is, you know,” he told Sherlock.

Sherlock smiled slightly. “She offered.”

Someone else might have told Sherlock off for treating Molly like the hired help, but from Molly’s awkward exit, John suspected it might actually have been the kindest thing for her. “Is it for the case, then? The analysis?” he asked, curious despite himself.

“Case?”

“The murder you went running off to investigate last week.”

“Oh. No, not that.” Sherlock’s expression darkened. “Complete waste of my time.”

“Sorry - catching a _murderer_ is a complete waste of your time?” John asked, voice sharp.

Sherlock looked surprised at John’s sudden anger. “No, of course not. I meant that the crime scene was a waste. No leads at all.”

John leaned back in his chair, mollified. “Oh. I see. Well, if it’s not for the Aurors, what are you investigating?”

“It’s research. For a private case, of sorts.” Sherlock caught John’s raised eyebrows and shrugged. “I take them when they’re interesting enough.”

John found it hard to imagine what sort of witch or wizard would need a consulting detective. Or where they might find Sherlock to hire him in the first place, which was the far more interesting question. 

“You know, I looked you up,” John said conversationally. “After last time you were here.”

Sherlock raised his eyebrows. “And? Anything interesting?”

“Apart from a birth and education record, there was nothing on you in the archives at all.” There’d been a copy of his school career, including a list of OWLs and NEWTs - which had made John feel inadequate, and he’d been quite academic, thank you very much - but very little else, not even a recent copy of the Holmes family tree. “It’s like you vanished after you left Hogwarts.” 

“Is it, indeed.”

An uncomfortable thought occurred to him. “Please tell me you didn’t remove your own files from the archives.”

Sherlock laughed. “No. I don’t care what records there are of me.”

Someone had obviously removed at least some of them deliberately, though, and knowing Sherlock there would be some shady reason for it. John decided right then that it was probably better not to know. “I would have had you down as a Ravenclaw,” he said instead.

“Ravenclaw?” Sherlock scoffed. “Dull. Ravenclaws fill their heads with trivia just for the sake of knowing it. There’s no benefit to intelligence unless you’re actually going to use it.”

It still seemed impossible that such a brilliant brain and a penchant for spending his spare time in a giant library hadn’t determined Sherlock’s sorting. “But you said you only take the interesting cases,” John pressed. “Isn’t that because you like the challenge?”

“I like the legwork, not just the theory. The best cases are the ones that can’t be solved from behind a desk in the Auror Office - the creative ones, the clever ones. Of course, that’s exactly why so many of them wouldn’t get solved without me,” he added dryly.

“Why not Gryffindor, then?”

“Because Gryffindors run into danger without thinking about it at all. They’re deliberately reckless.”

“Oh, thanks.”

Sherlock didn’t look even a tiny bit apologetic. In fact, he looked more engaged by the argument than any of the rest of their conversation. “Oh, come on, you’re the perfect example. You picked one of the most dangerous careers going.”

“An archivist?” John asked dryly.

“A Hit Wizard. No one chooses that by accident. You transferred onto the force precisely because whatever you were doing before was too conventional, didn’t give you the adrenaline rush you wanted.” 

John blinked in surprise. “Dare I ask how you figured that out?”

“I knew you must have trained in _something_ before you signed up - you can’t have joined fresh out of Hogwarts, or else a wizard like you would’ve worked his way into a position of command by now, and therefore not been in the line of fire. Besides, you’re not nearly battle-scarred enough.” Sherlock shrugged as if his deductions were nothing. “You like trouble, that’s not a bad thing. Ravenclaws are boring. You’re not.”

John got the impression that Sherlock’s compliments, however backhanded, were few and far between. “It was Healing,” he said after a moment. “About six months after I qualified, I got sick of using my training to treat dragonpox and Kneazle bites. There was more I could do with MLE.” To this day, it was one of the boldest decisions John had ever made. Looking back now, knowing how it ended, he wondered if he would have made the same choice again. 

“Were you any good?”

He bristled. “Very good.” One of the best, in fact. The hospital had begged him to reconsider, but more than one of his team members had ended up being glad he hadn’t.

“Hmm.” Sherlock tilted his head thoughtfully. “It’s a shame, then.”

John narrowed his eyes. “A shame?” he asked flatly.

“That you won’t work with me. A Healer with field experience? You could tell me far more than the useless specialists the Aurors bring in.”

Ah, that again. Sherlock must really not be used to people saying no. “Nice try, but if you’re trying to butter me up, it’s not working.”

“You seem interested enough in the case.”

“Human nature, isn’t it? To be interested in stuff like this. Morbid curiosity.” He shrugged.

Sherlock shook his head. “It’s more than that.”

“No, it isn’t. I’ve seen more than enough trouble for one lifetime.” And there was something fundamentally inappropriate about feeling as if you’d missed out on a crime scene. “Besides, it doesn’t matter, not with the state I’m in.” 

“State?”

“Well, I can hardly run diagnostic spells with a wand that only works half the time, can I? I wouldn’t be nearly as useful as you think. And I definitely can’t chase after dark wizards on _this_.” He shifted his leg and it flared in pain, as if to prove his point.

Sherlock followed the movement intently. “It still hurts.”

“No, I just thought the cane made me look cool.” John heard the hard edge creeping into his voice, and sighed, trying again in a more patient tone. “Yeah. No actual physical damage, but that doesn’t matter. They never found a painkilling potion that worked.”

Sherlock’s expression was properly curious now. “What does it feel like?”

John almost refused to answer that one. With anyone else, he might have shut down the conversation already; it was only because Sherlock’s interest was academic rather than sympathetic that he answered at all. “Like… like ice, in my bones. It never really goes away.”

“Why couldn’t they fix it? Or find a way of managing it at least. They must have been able to identify the curse.”

They had. John had, recognising the curse from his training even as he could feel its effects starting to work on him. It was a particularly nasty curse in the same family as the Cruciatus; identifying it hadn’t been the problem.

Sherlock seemed to be able to read the answer on him. “Ah,” he breathed. “There were two curses, weren’t there?”

John coughed to cover his grimace of discomfort. “Yeah.” The conversation was straying into dangerous territory now; there was a reason why he didn’t talk about this much. “The other one, it hit my left shoulder. The Healers said the two spells probably interacted. That’s why none of the standard treatments worked.”

“It’s your wand arm,” Sherlock murmured, with the air of someone putting two and two together. “That’s why your spellcasting is affected.”

John tightened his grip on his cane. “They don’t know for sure,” he said quietly.

“But it varies. Your ability.” When John gave him a startled look in reply, wondering how on earth he could have known that, Sherlock elaborated. “You wouldn’t be here if you could rely on it. But I’ve seen you cast spells, and you keep your wand with you, up your sleeve ready to use - probably a remnant from wearing it on a holster - so clearly some days you do actually use it, enough to warrant keeping it close.”

“I’ll never get used to the way you do that.” John shook his head in disbelief.

“It’s just observation. Anyone could do it.”

“I doubt that.”

Sherlock waved away the praise distractedly, still pursuing his questioning. “Does it correlate? With the pain in your leg?”

“Usually.” He didn’t provide details, didn’t talk about the first few weeks back in London, when his leg had been agony and his magic so wrecked that at times he’d been stymied by Muggle-repelling charms. Or the way that after a night of little sleep, his hand shook so badly that he couldn’t hold his wand still to cast anything, whether the spells would come or not.

Sherlock seemed to pick up on John’s discomfort then. “I’m sorry,” he offered, instead of more questions.

“For what? It’s hardly your fault.”

“That the St Mungo’s Spell Damage specialists are so incompetent.”

Sherlock looked so haughty that John couldn’t help but smile. “I couldn’t fix myself either,” he pointed out.

“Yes, well, we’ve already established that you’re an idiot. Oh, don’t look like that,” Sherlock added. “Practically everybody is.”

* * *

Sherlock might have decided that John was an idiot, but the next time he came to the archives, he was carrying a file under his arm and he headed straight for John’s desk without any pretence otherwise.

“These documents,” he said, dropping the file in front of John, “are highly classified and confidential.”

John gathered that meant he was supposed to read them. He could tell the file wasn’t a record from the archives, since it was magenta rather than beige and far nicer quality parchment, and when he thumbed it open, he recognised the seal first and the contents second. He closed it again slowly. “This is a case file. From the Auror office.”

“Yes.”

“On the murder case.”

“Of course, the murder case.” Sherlock gave him a look that clearly said _which queue were you standing in when they were handing out brains?_ “No other interesting criminals running about at the moment.”

There were so many things wrong with that sentence that John didn’t even try to pick it apart. “And you’re showing this to me, why, exactly?”

“Because you trained as a Healer and a Hit Wizard, and I wanted a second opinion. I thought it might interest you.”

“You’re not just looking for an excuse to mock my intelligence?”

“Oh, please.” Sherlock gave John his best disdainful expression. “I don’t need excuses.”

That, John supposed, was very true, but regardless of Sherlock’s motives, John knew he should still turn Sherlock down - push the file back across the desk and reiterate that he really didn’t want anything to do with it.

The problem was, that would’ve been a lie. “Fine,” he sighed. “You might as well pull up a chair. I’ll make tea.”

It was probably setting a dangerous precedent to let Sherlock take over what was meant to be John’s lunch break, and to make the man tea at that, but this was

perhaps the most interesting thing that had happened to him all week. He reopened the file as Sherlock eschewed the spare desk chair, Conjured an armchair on the other side of John’s desk instead, and threw himself into it looking vaguely triumphant.

Once he flipped past the first few pages of paperwork, John found that most of the file was taken up with photographs of the crime scenes, including several unnaturally still shots of the victims that could have been taken with Muggle cameras, supplemented with a few scrawled notes and statements. The second victim was the worst, a boy who looked barely old enough to have had the Trace lifted. He stared blankly up at the ceiling with glassy eyes.

“The Prophet said it was Muggleborn hate-crimes. I didn’t think that happened any more.”

Sherlock pursed his lips. “I’ve looked for any other possible connections, but there’s nothing. He isn’t even being consistent across age or gender. It’s about blood status.”

“He?”

“Statistically more likely.”

“Don’t you ever get female murderers, then?”

“You do, yes, but female serial killers are rare,” Sherlock explained. “Most women kill for personal reasons, revenge, desperation, that sort of thing, and they don’t drag it out. This killer abducts and hangs on to his victims for a while before he kills them, which strongly suggests he’s male. That being said, he’s using a typically female murder weapon - poison, some sort of slow-acting paralytic.”

“A murderer who has a problem with the Killing Curse?” John had spent most of his career dodging that particular spell. In his experience, once a person had made it past a certain level of illegal, they didn’t mess about.

“Perhaps it’s too quick,” Sherlock suggested grimly. “Not quite the dramatic statement he was hoping to make.”

John suppressed a shudder. “You said he abducts his victims - the Imperius Curse?”

“Probably. The victims vanish without signs of a struggle, or at least no one reports seeing them go, and they always turn up in places they’ve got no reason to be in.” A scowl knit itself into Sherlock’s forehead. “But after that, we have no idea what he does with them, except that he forces them to take the poison when he’s done. Torture, possibly, but they’re hardly in a condition to tell us.”

John’s lip curled involuntarily. He almost preferred the sort of wizards he’d been tracking down for MLE. It was a particularly sobering thought to think that he’d still been out there doing that when the first of these murders had only just taken place. “A lot of curses still leave marks on the body. A Dark Arts specialist could probably work some of it out.”

Sherlock flashed him a grin. “Are you volunteering?”

John rolled his eyes. “The photos are enough. Don’t push it.”

As promised in the papers, there were three victims so far, and as utterly unrelated to each other as Sherlock had said. It seemed they’d been chosen more for convenience than for conformity to a particular profile, being taken from their everyday lives during brief moments when they were alone - working late in an office, walking home from a party, nipping back to fetch a set of keys. 

“So, what do you think?”

“Of the crime scenes?”

“Of the bodies. You’re a Healer, what can you tell about the cause of death?”

John flipped from the written reports back to the photographs, focusing at first on the wider shots and then on the close-ups. “Blue lips and extremities on all three victims suggests asphyxiation,” he said slowly, “I’m guessing from paralysis. Can’t tell much from the photos, but I can’t see any signs of a struggle or trauma, even from a spell.”

“Because there wasn’t any. We already know what the murder weapon was, the Aurors found a half-empty vial of the poison next to the third victim. Maybe it didn’t take the whole dose to kill her, or perhaps the murderer was just in a rush to get away.”

“Hang on - if you’ve already got the poison, what do you need me for?”

Sherlock’s expression darkened and John realised he’d hit a sore spot. “There’s a sample but no classification, and Lestrade won’t let me analyse it. The Auror Office has their own potions specialists, apparently.”

The name was familiar, scrawled in signature across the bottom of most of the official reports in the file in front of him. In his mind’s eye, John saw the photo of the grey-haired wizard from the paper. “Lestrade is the Auror who’s heading the investigation?”

“Yes. He brought me in after the second victim was found.”

“Why won’t he let you look at the evidence, then?”

“Because _officially_ , I’m not part of the investigations.” Sherlock pursed his lips. “I’m not on MLE payroll, and my name never goes down on any of the official records.”

John struggled to wrap his head around that. “You’re saying that no one ever knows it was actually you that solved the case?”

“The people who matter know.”

“MLE, you mean.”

“Some of them.” Sherlock narrowed his eyes. “Not the ones in charge. But most of the senior Aurors have at least heard of me, if not asked for my help at some point in the past. Lestrade just happens to be the best at accepting his own incompetence.”

“But that’s unfair,” John protested. “Why should they get the credit for your work?”

Sherlock smirked. “See, I said that you were the perfect example of a Gryffindor. Things are hardly as black and white as you’d like, John - in real life, it doesn’t matter what you’ve achieved, only what you can make people _think_ you’ve achieved.”

“Detecting _and_ philosophy, are you sure you weren’t a Ravenclaw?”

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Diagnosing dead bodies _and_ sticking up for consultants’ rights, are you sure you don’t want in?”

“I said, don’t push it,” John warned. “I’m helping you because I’m on my lunch break, not because I plan to switch careers.”

Sherlock didn’t look entirely convinced by that, but he did keep his mouth shut and let John finish reading the file. There wasn’t a lot left to read. The only notes were made by Aurors at the scene, with no witness reports to lend any substance, not even a nosy old lady peeking through net curtains.

Eventually, John put the file down with a sigh. “I don’t think I’m going to see anything new that you’ve not already spotted. The only weird thing about the whole case, you’ve already mentioned.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.” John frowned. “You said, poison is typically a female murder weapon. Not the sort of thing you’d usually see in serial killings.”

“And you think that’s significant?”

“Probably not, but…”

Sherlock leaned forward impatiently. “Just say it, John.”

“Well, either he’s afraid of getting his hands dirty, which for a murderer seems a bit unlikely, or he’s deliberately using poison as some sort of - I don’t know, signature.”

Sherlock drummed his fingers against the desk in a thoughtful rhythm. “You think the victims aren’t important, that they’re secondary to the choice of weapon.”

“Maybe.” John shrugged. “Maybe he’s only going after Muggleborns because they’re more convenient. Spend more time in Muggle neighbourhoods, more likely to live alone, that sort of thing.”

Sherlock stopped his tapping in favour of steepling his fingers in front of his face in the way that always implied thinking. “Or maybe,” he said slowly, “it’s both.”


	4. Chapter 4

“… and he’d managed to get his head stuck _inside_ the kettle, poor bloke. We had to call in the Obliviators for that one.”

John snorted. “I don’t imagine the owners were too pleased.”

“What they don’t remember won’t hurt them.” Mike grinned, going for his glass. “It’ll be a classic in the office for years to come, though.”

“I bet.” This was the sort of conversational pause that required a politely interested question. “Sounds like you’re glad you moved.”

“It’s more sociable up in Reversals. The furniture is better behaved, too,” he joked, and then shrugged. “But the archives have their charm.”

“Yes, they do,” John murmured.

“You’re getting on alright, then?” Mike asked. With two plates between them as a culinary buffer, evidently he’d decided that a more serious conversation was safe to broach now. “Settled in?”

John swallowed his mouthful and gathered the next one without looking up. “I am, yeah. It’s… good. Pays the rent.”

“I hope Molly’s not working you too hard.”

“No, no, she’s been great. The other regulars are more difficult,” John added dryly.

Mike paused halfway through picking up his fork, looking pained. “Ah. Yes, Sherlock can be a bit rude. But he’s alright underneath it all.”

“Oh, no, I meant the cat.” John smiled. “Sherlock’s fine. Although he does have a habit of appearing in the office unannounced. Makes it hard to get paperwork done.”

“Really? He comes to the office?”

John looked up from his plate at that and frowned. “Yeah, of course. Why wouldn’t he?”

“He didn’t when I was there.” Mike frowned. “Perhaps you’re just more interesting than an ex bank worker.”

Actually, John suspected it was more a case of John being an appreciative audience. In the last week and a half Sherlock had come to the archives nearly every day, ostensibly to work on cases and conduct obscure research in the Investigations aisles, but just as often he would sit in the office monologuing about his most recent case. John found the complex deductions fascinating - they could’ve used a brain like that out in the field - and Sherlock liked to be complimented and act smug. Truthfully, it seemed like a bit of a novelty for him to have someone to share his cases with.

No, John’s personal life was hardly a draw for Sherlock. “I’m not interesting at all.”

“Don’t be so modest, I could tell he was intrigued when I first introduced you. Oh, no, not like that,” Mike said quickly at John’s raised eyebrow, waving his fork as if to dismiss the idea. “He’s not like that.”

“I was starting to get that impression. Molly’s totally gone on him, and he doesn’t even seem to realise.”

“Bless her. She’s a nice girl.” Mike sighed, then shook his head as if to clear it and leaned forward conspiratorially. “Speaking of which - no new flames?”

“Who’d want me?” John asked, smiling grimly. “I’m falling apart.” No one in their right mind would go for a near-Squib with a limp. In truth, he hadn’t really been looking, either. Since he spent all the time that he wasn’t home at work instead, his options were mostly limited to Molly or the witch at the desk in the Atrium.

“I don’t believe that, I remember your reputation at school. Maybe you just need to get out more,” Mike joked.

It was meant innocently, but it felt like being sat in his therapist’s office and John was immediately defensive. “Yeah, maybe I could join a duelling club. Or play Quidditch,” he retorted, the words coming out bitter.

There was a long, uncomfortable silence, in which John watched Mike shift uncomfortably across from him, and he knew he should apologise. Logically he knew it wasn’t Mike’s fault that his entire life had gone to shit.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “It’s just… with this leg, there’s not much getting out I can manage.”

“Well, you’re welcome up in the Reversals office if you’re ever at a loose end,” Mike offered eventually - carefully - and John forced himself to smile and look enthused at the prospect.

The conversation never really set itself back on smooth tracks after that, and they both finished and paid for their lunches with a sense of relief. John shook Mike’s hand and tried to act friendly when they parted ways, though, since Mike had gone to the effort of inviting him. It would be childish to alienate the few friends he had left.

For once, the familiar quiet of the archives was comforting rather than ordinary, and John breathed in the smell of parchment and dust, secure in the knowledge that no one here would ask him to talk about his feelings. No wonder Molly liked it down here, shy as she was.

Speaking of Molly, John had every intention of finding her and telling her she could take her own lunch break, but she wasn’t in the office. Instead, John found that Sherlock had commandeered it, sprawling in the Conjured chair that had become his and looking for all the world like he owned the place. John was surprised, having assumed that Sherlock wouldn’t bother to wait, but not unpleasantly so.

“I’ll make tea, shall I?” John said from the doorway, sounding put out but feeling relieved. This was company that didn’t involve talking about his leg or his magic or what he did or didn’t do in his spare time.

Sherlock looked up from the parchment he was glaring at. “You’ve been out,” he said accusingly.

“No! Alert the Wizengamot.”

“Where? It can’t have been a therapist’s appointment, you’d never schedule one in your lunch break -”

“How did you know I’ve got a therapist?”

Sherlock gave him a withering look. “An ex Hit Wizard with curse damage, of course you’ve got a therapist.”

Technically, that was still true, although John had cancelled his last appointment with Ella. The week before he’d resorted to telling her about the owl in an effort to deflect her questions about work, since he could hardly tell her about the judicious crime-solving he’d been doing in his lunch breaks. She’d been predictably patronising about the whole thing. When John had insisted that the owl was very much not his familiar, she’d written the words _resistant to change_ on her parchment, smiled, and told him he should consider naming it.

“But that’s not where you were,” Sherlock continued, his narrowed eyes tracking John as he walked across the office. “You were out to lunch, with Stamford. You probably accepted the invitation more out of a sense of obligation than anything else, after all, he did get you this job.”

“ _How_ \- oh, never mind.” John shook his head and sat heavily in his chair. “Yes, I was at lunch. You should try it sometimes.”

“Ugh, eating, eating’s boring. I’ve got murders to solve.”

“Mmm, having any luck with that?”

“None at all.” Sherlock waved the parchment at John with a sour expression as if it had done him a disservice. “Lestrade sent me a copy of the analysis they did on the poison. They couldn’t find any traces of ingredients which could cause the symptoms the victims showed. It’s not a poison they recognise.”

“An uncommon one? That would take longer to find.”

“Common or not, any competent analyst would have something by now.” Sherlock made a frustrated noise deep in his throat. “One woman and two men lying dead, and they’re letting _imbeciles_ mess about with the only evidence.”

“Well, maybe it’s not a poison.”

“Don’t be stupid, John, it can’t be anything else.”

“No, listen to me. It could’ve been a forced overdose of something relatively harmless, you’d be surprised how often that happens by accident. Or an old potions recipe, one that’s unstable when made with modern ingredients -”

“Of course,” Sherlock breathed, interrupting the rest of John’s train of thought. “For an average mind you’re remarkably good at jumping onto the right train of thought - it’s hemlock. How didn’t I see it before?”

“Great, thanks. And you didn’t see it because hemlock-based poisons don’t paralyse their victims, they cause seizures.”

“ _Water_ hemlock, yes,” Sherlock said slowly. His eyes were wide with an epiphany and focused on something beyond John. “But it could be _poison_ hemlock. It’s a completely different plant. They share a name because most of their properties are basically the same, but in an unbalanced potion, poison hemlock causes respiratory paralysis instead of seizures. It’s an old-fashioned ingredient, completely dropped out of use, but it fits. It’s sometimes known as -”

“Conium,” John finished, his old Potions and Plant Poisoning lectures suddenly flooding back. “Essence of conium. But there’s a whole class of poisons based on it, how are you going to know which one the killer used?”

“I don’t necessarily need to. An illegal, archaic potion like this, he has to be brewing it himself, which means all we need to do is find the supplier of the hemlock. There shouldn’t be more than a handful of places selling it these days.”

“What if it isn’t poison hemlock? In the interest of playing Devil’s advocate.” He shrugged unapologetically at Sherlock’s raised eyebrow. “Some medicinal potions contain aconite, an overdose would have similar effects until you look closer.”

Sherlock’s lip twisted. “There’s no guarantee, but I’ll have Lestrade tell the analysts to check the poison they found. If it is conium, that’s the first real lead we’ve had on this entire case.” He pulled his wand out of his sleeve and waved it in a complicated pattern; a burst of silvery light shot out of the end, wrapped briefly around Sherlock’s wrist, and then dissolved itself through the ceiling.

John watched it go. “What was _that_?”

“Patronus,” Sherlock told him, as if talking to a particularly dim third year. His wand was out of sight again. “I prefer them to owls or memos. More direct, far more tamper-proof.”

John knew what the Patronus Charm did, obviously, it had been a requirement when he’d joined, but he’d never seen it cast non-verbally before, or used to relay messages. “Wait - you communicate with your Patronus?”

“Yes. I invented the spell myself.”

Of course he had. Bloody hell. John shook his head in disbelief. “Forget MLE, I think Mysteries itself would snap you up.”

For some reason, however, that caused Sherlock’s lip to curl, wiping away the smugness that John’s surprise had caused. “I would never work in the Department of Mysteries,” he replied flatly. “No matter what they offered.”

“Well, I’m sure the Auror Office are secretly relieved to hear it.”

“Yes,” Sherlock replied shortly, but it seemed to work a little, thawing the sneer into a more neutral expression. He didn’t say anything else.

“Right, well,” John said eventually, indicating a pile of request forms that had built up in his inbox from the department by the same name. “If you don’t need any more help with the case, I should probably get back to it. Not technically my lunch break anymore.”

Sherlock just nodded. “I’ll walk with you. I’m done at the Ministry today.”

They left the office as Molly was walking towards it. She spotted Sherlock and froze, as usual. “Oh. Hello.”

Sherlock barely broke stride. “Ah, Molly, I’m glad I caught you. I need you to fetch me any information the archives have on a potions ingredient called essence of conium for the next time I’m here. It’s quite old-fashioned, it might take some digging.”

Molly twisted her hands awkwardly. “Well, I’m not sure whether -”

“It’s important. It’s for a case.” Sherlock stopped walking and turned to give her an earnest stare - hopeful, eyes widened innocently - which John personally thought was overkill.

It seemed to work on Molly, though. She crumbled under the weight of it. “Right. Yes, of course.”

As they set off walking again, John watched her scurry into the relative safety of the office over his shoulder with resignation. Sherlock didn’t even need the information very badly, or he would have fetched it himself. “She does have an actual job, you know, other than running around after you,” he remarked half-heartedly.

“Then why is she so keen on _running around_ after me, as you put it?”

“Because she likes you.” Was Sherlock really so oblivious? _He’s not like that_ , John remembered Mike saying. But Sherlock was only human. And he was meant to be observant.

“Does she?” the man replied vaguely.

“Yes.” John paused, and decided to take the opportunity to investigate and satisfy his curiosity. “You’re not interested, then.”

“Well spotted.”

“Already got a girlfriend?”

Sherlock snorted incredulously. “No. Girls aren’t really my area.”

“Oh.” _Oh._ Of course, the hair, the clothes. The pieces slotted themselves together. “I see. Have you got a boyfriend, then? Which is fine, by the way,” John added, as Sherlock looked up sharply, coming to a dead stop.

“I know it’s fine,” he snapped.

The defensiveness was as good as a confirmation. “So you do have a boyfriend.”

“No.” Sherlock continued to watch John, his eyes accusing and wary, as if expecting him to make some sort of comment. It felt like a stand-off, and John was very much aware that he’d strayed into poor conversational territory.

“So you’re unattached, like me,” John said calmly, picking an nice, neutral word. “That’s good. Fine.”

They started walking again, and there was a pause in which John thought he’d succeeded in ending the conversation. Then -

“John,” Sherlock started slowly, looking distinctly uncomfortable. He didn’t meet John’s eyes. “You should know that I consider myself married to my work, and while I’m flattered by your interest, I think you may have misinterpreted what we’re doing here -”

“No,” John said, alarmed, waving the hand that wasn’t gripping his cane to emphasis the point. Was the man’s ego really that great? “No, I wasn’t suggesting - I’m just saying, it’s all _fine_.”

Sherlock watched him suspiciously for a moment as if trying to decide if John meant what he said. Then he nodded stiffly. “Good. Thank you.” He cleared his throat. “For your help earlier, too. It was… invaluable.”

John allowed himself a satisfied little grin. Thanks from Sherlock Holmes, he’d learned, did not come easily. Especially when there wasn’t a snide insult attached. “You should bring me your other cases, too, the non-criminal ones,” he suggested lightly. “That private one you keep talking about, maybe. I could help.”

Sherlock smiled faintly, recovered from his gratitude. “I’m not sure it’s the sort of case you’d be interested in. Less murder, more research.”

John shrugged to cover a vague sense of disappointment. “Well. Not everything can be gruesome.”

“Mmm, more’s the pity."

* * *

The next day was a Saturday, and with most Ministry workers taking their weekend off without hesitation, the slowest working day in the archives. John’s usual habit was to go in anyway, and help Molly finish all the odd jobs from earlier in the week, more out of boredom than anything else. This week, however, he gave himself the morning off with the intention of using it to restock the cupboards; he needed more Dreamless Sleep, and with the best will in the world, man could not live on biscuits and beans on toast alone.

John generally preferred to shop Muggle, and the Saturday crowd in Diagon Alley reminded him why. No one could possibly worry that the wizarding population was dwindling when surrounded by this many people. There were queues for every single stall, and it took him several minutes to squeeze through the throng of people in the apothecary to reach the shelf he needed.

He was beaten to the last bottle of Dreamless Sleep by a smartly-dressed witch whose heels gave her a couple of inches on him, snatching it off the shelf just seconds before he got there. The witch turned to give him a triumphant look, and then did a double take, obviously catching sight of his cane. “Oh,” she said, eyes wide. “I’m so sorry.”

John turned to leave. There were other places he could buy a potion if he needed to. “Don’t worry about it.”

She pressed the potion into his hand. “Here. You have it.”

John knew she was trying to be nice, to be polite, but he had to press his lips together into a thin line in order to keep himself from saying something rude. “That’s really not -”

“I insist. Please.”

He sighed, worked his jaw, and then dug for some gratitude somewhere. “Thank you.”

The witch gave him an uncomfortable smile, nodded, and hurried away to the shelves of ingredients, no doubt planning to brew her own instead. John looked at the potion in his hand and tried to ignore the feeling of embarrassment that it conjured up. It was alright for a person to do something nice for someone else, he reminded himself. It wasn’t her fault that it made him feel like a child.

Fighting to put a lid on his sudden bad mood, John walked back out into Diagon Alley with a new determination to manage a successful shopping trip. He forced himself to duck into a few more shops rather than simply giving up and going home, and ended up buying himself a new quill in Scribbulus - since theft seemed to be one of those things that Sherlock didn’t worry about, and all his others had gone missing - and a new copy of _Bonham’s Anatomy_. John was unsure about that last one as soon as he bought it, but even if he never lent any Healing knowledge to another of Sherlock’s cases, he could at least refresh his memory a bit.

On the way back to the Leaky to Floo home, John made a detour to Eeylops for the final item on his list. He didn’t share Ella’s optimism that naming the creature would make it less annoying, but with the owl showing absolutely no signs of leaving, John figured he could at least try a peace offering for the sake of his furniture.

From the selection they had, John picked a cage which was more than big enough for a screech owl and pointed it out to the cashier. After a moment’s thought he snatched up a couple of packets of owl treats and dropped them on the counter too, since there was no point in doing this halfway.

He realised the problem as soon as it came to leaving, however. The cage weighed more than it rightfully should, and John’s Featherweight Charm was little more than useless, so manoeuvring the whole lot out the door while keeping a grip on the rest of his bags was harder than expected. Mid-attempt, he was accosted by a particularly keen shop assistant who spotted the cane and took that mean he was completely deficient.

“I can carry that for you, sir, if you’d like?” the kid asked brightly.

“No, thank you.”

Over-Eager wasn’t so easily deterred. “Or I can levitate it for you -”

“I’m fine on my own.”

“- possibly easier on your leg, sir, I wouldn’t want -”

John had opened his mouth before he was even aware of it. “ _Damn_ my leg!”

The small shop immediately quietened and everyone around him froze, turning to blink at him with startled expressions. Under the weight of them all, John regretted his outburst, looking down at the floor so he didn’t have to meet anyone’s eyes. The only blessing was that the wide-eyed assistant seemed to finally get the message. He muttered a hasty apology and scurried back towards the relative safety of the shop counter.

John gripped his cane so hard that his knuckles went white. He turned and pushed towards the door, people moving out of the way of his cane automatically, and heard conversation awkwardly starting up again behind him.

Outside the shop, John’s hands were shaking so badly that it took him three tries to shrink the cage to a size that would fit in a Floo. He tried not to think about how long it would take him to reverse the simple spell once he got home.

As it turned out, he needn’t have wasted the energy worrying about it. The owl took one look at the cage, clicked its beak disdainfully, and flew to the other side of the room to perch in its habitual spot on the bedpost, which by now was covered in claw marks.

That was very much the last straw for John.

“Fine.” He gestured angrily, and a flare of accidental magic sent the cage door slamming shut with a loud clang, making him jump. “Stay, don’t stay, use the cage, don’t use it. I don’t care any more. You can bloody well suit yourself.”

The owl gave a vaguely mournful screech as he grabbed a handful of Floo powder, as if confused about why he was shouting at it. “And don’t expect me to be sending any post, either,” John added vindictively.

Even though he could have taken the afternoon off too, John had few other places to go to, so he headed for the Ministry. By the time John he’d negotiated the journey without any Apparition at all and limped down the level nine staircases, he was in a completely foul mood and willing to rip the wand arm off anyone who so much as looked at him funny. As he made his way towards the archives - mentally cursing the Transport idiots who’d failed to fix the fireplace - he even considered bypassing the office entirely, knowing it wasn’t fair to inflict his foul mood on Molly, but for the fact that all of his work was on his desk.

That was the theory, anyway. In reality, when he got there, John found that his desk was already occupied - more specifically, it had been completely cleared of all of John’s paperwork, and was now covered in jars of potions ingredients, a small cauldron over a flame in the middle of it all, and the culprit sat brazenly in John’s desk chair.

He stopped dead in the doorway. “What in Godric’s name are you doing?”

Sherlock didn’t look up. “Potion. Obviously.”

John knew that Sherlock knew that wasn’t what he’d been asking, and he felt a surge of irritation. He might be taking out his bad mood on Sherlock, but at the moment he found it very hard to care, especially when the man had taken liberties with all of John’s things. “I _meant_ , why are you doing it on my bloody desk?”

“I was waiting for you.” Sherlock picked up an idle pinch of herbs and tossed them haphazardly into the cauldron, leaning back out of the way of the puff of smoke it caused. “You’re late, actually. Do all Ministry employees get to come and go as they please?”

“Only the ones who have to deal with lunatics taking over their workspaces.”

“It was a convenient place to work,” Sherlock said mulishly.

“That doesn’t explain why you thought it would be a good idea to set a _fire_ in an _office_. There’s paper everywhere -”

“Relax, it’s not like we’re in the archives proper. It’s perfectly safe, I’ve done this hundreds of times.”

“Hundreds of -” John pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, and made a conscious effort to lower his voice. “Where’s Molly?”

“Archiving things, I presume. That _is_ her job.”

“And what are you doing that’s so bloody important?”

Sherlock waved a small vial of dark liquid at John triumphantly. “This. I’ve finally got hold of the poison. I’m breaking it down to determine the ingredients.”

“Lestrade gave it to you?” John asked, momentarily surprised out of his annoyance.

“Not precisely. I appropriated it from the Evidence Room. They didn’t need it, they’ve already finished their own useless analysis,” Sherlock added.

“Sherlock. You can’t take evidence from the Auror Office without them knowing.”

“Apparently I can.”

“Well, then. You shouldn’t.”

“There’s evidence in the Department of Archives that I have access to all the time, you’ve never objected to that before,” Sherlock pointed out. He was frowning, as if he were genuinely confused by John’s reaction.

John laughed incredulously. “Of course not, this isn’t… It’s not like sneaking into the archives, that’s old evidence from closed cases which can’t hurt anyone. This is a whole new level of illegal. How did you even get hold of it?”

Sherlock held out a Ministry identity badge. It was the first one John had ever seen him with, but rather than saying Sherlock Holmes, visitor as he expected, this one said _Gregory Lestrade, Senior Auror (full clearance)_.

“Full clearance?” John read. “You’ve got Lestrade’s badge?”

“One of them, yes,” Sherlock said, sounding bored. “I pickpocket him when he’s annoying.”

John wondered if Sherlock had ever pickpocketed him, too. Perhaps for access to the archives, and wouldn’t that explain a lot? “I’m keeping this,” he told Sherlock grimly, closing the badge in his fist.

“Feel free. I’ve got a whole stack at home.”

“Wow. Are you completely ignorant of social boundaries or do you just ignore them on purpose?”

Sherlock gave him that focused look that always meant he was deducing something. “You’ve been to Diagon Alley this morning,” he commented. “I can see why you don’t go often, if it always puts you in such a bad mood.”

It was hardly the normal stresses of shopping that had pissed him off, and Sherlock-the-consulting-detective must have known that. It irritated John that Sherlock could tell how much his leg was hurting him and what a crap morning he’d had. He opened his mouth and was about to form some sort of intelligent response when he was interrupted by a sound of triumph from Sherlock.

“Oh! We were right, John - poison hemlock.” He rubbed his hands together gleefully. “This is brilliant.”

“Brilliant that people are being murdered with hemlock.”

“Yes, don’t you see? It’ll take us a matter of hours to find the right apothecary, there can’t be more than a handful that sell it. Their records should lead us right to the killer.”

John focused on a very specific part of that monologue, Sherlock’s excitement not catching for once. “Sorry - us?”

“Yes, us. We can split up, it’ll make the whole process that much faster -”

“You think I’m coming with you.”

Sherlock’s head snapped up, expression confused. “Aren’t you?”

“No, Sherlock. I’ve said it twice already. Why do you keep asking?”

“Because you clearly want to come. It wouldn’t even be that dangerous, I let the Aurors make the actual arrests.”

“So I’d just stand there and look decorative, would I?”

“Of course not, John,” Sherlock said irritably, as if John were being intentionally stupid. “You’re an ex-Hit Wizard and a qualified Healer, you’re perfect for the job. You’ve already demonstrated you’re willing to talk about the cases with me, so it’s not as if you’re worried about the legality - why should this be any different?”

“Because I’m practically a Squib, Sherlock, and I can barely walk.” John gestured angrily at himself, pointed at the cane leaning against his desk. “How am I perfect for chasing after you and tracking down criminals? On cases, I might add, that I’m not even authorised to know about?”

“A second opinion is always valuable to me.”

“There’s absolutely no reason why it should be my opinion.”

“There’s no reason why not, either.” Sherlock leaned forward in his chair intently. “We could fix your limp. Potions, spells, there’s always something.”

“Several people, experts in fact, have tried that already -”

“I could find the solution, I’m a genius, remember? And your lack of magic isn’t necessarily because of the curse damage. You’ve admitted it comes and goes, with the pain in your leg. I’m willing to bet your therapist thinks it’s psychosomatic, too.”

John felt a wave of anger at that. Ella’s theories on his magic were unwelcome enough, and it was her job - he definitely didn’t want Sherlock’s unsolicited opinions as well. “I was hit, in the shoulder, by an unidentified curse. Immediately following that, I lost the ability to cast anything except the most simple spells. Seems like cause and effect to me.” He bit at his words and felt his hands tightening into painful fists.

“It’s a mental block.” Now Sherlock had moved from annoyed into completely frustrated. “With a bit of work, you could overcome it.”

“Drop it, Sherlock. You’re not the number one authority on my curse damage.”

“You have a chance to be better, to perform magic again, and you’re not even _trying_ to take it -”

“I said, _drop it_.” John brought his fist down on the desk, and the noise of it cut Sherlock off mid-sentence, his mouth snapping closed so quickly John could almost hear his teeth clacking together. “Right now. I’m not a bloody charity case.”

Sherlock took a deep breath, obviously making a conscious effort to lower his voice and reign in his temper. “Of course you’re not,” he said placatingly, and then abruptly ruined the effort. “It’s interesting, it’s as much for my sake as it is yours -”

“And I’m not one of your puzzles or cases, either, you arse!”

“Don’t you want to be fixed?”

John’s voice shot up in volume into what could only be described as a shout. “I want a lot of things! I want to be able to stand up properly without a cane. I want to ride a broomstick again. I want to be able to cast a bloody Tempus Charm and get rid of this watch, and I want to be able to sleep through an entire night without worrying about nightmares or an addiction to Dreamless _fucking_ Sleep!” John rubbed at his eyes in frustration, trying to find a modicum of calm. “Look, I appreciate that you’re trying to help. But I don’t need a second therapist, and I’m not coming with you on this bloody case, so please, just drop it.”

“You won’t make me feel guilty for telling the truth.”

“How about for being an insensitive prick?”

Sherlock’s lip curled. “I’ll take insensitive over cowardly any day.”

There was a sound at the door that cut off John’s reply, and Molly chose that moment to walk in, waving a roll of parchment. “Sherlock, I found that reference you were looking for - oh.” She stopped abruptly, clearly feeling the tension. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt -”

“Could you give us a minute, Molly?” Sherlock said brusquely, without looking at her.

The way Sherlock was treating Molly - kicking her out of her own bloody office, for fuck’s sake - was suddenly too much, the final straw. Before she could turn and leave, he called after her. “Ignore him, Molly, there’s no need. You’ve still not had your lunch break, and I’ve got some requests to answer.” He gave Sherlock a glare. “We don’t need the office.”

Molly looked very much torn between the two of them, not sure whose lead to follow. John solved the problem for her by grabbing the entirety of his inbox from where it had been dumped on the spare desk and walking out as fast as his limp would allow, leaving Sherlock sat in John’s chair staring after him.


End file.
